Play “All in the Family” theme song.
Oh, the good old. Do you remember the good old days? I remember my parents talking about the good old days. “I remember when . . .” my parents would say. “Back in my day . . .” was another favorite. What about, “When I was you age . . ..” Simon and Garfunkel had a song in the 60s that said, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” They were longing for different times, the good old days. The “All in the Family” theme song was a satire, but it points out that people often long for the good old days. Oh, we love the good old days. Why aren’t things like they used to be? What happened to the good old days?
The prophet Isaiah sang a similar song.
Turn with me to Isaiah 64. Read Scripture.
The glory days are long gone. The Northern Kingdom of a divided Israel had been taken into captivity. The southern kingdom of Judah was precariously balanced between rival international powers. This is similar to modern times. Israel is currently balanced rather precariously in an area world that desperately wants to see it destroyed. Rival powers were vying for supremacy in the Middle East. That sounds familiar. Judah longed for the days of its power. David and Solomon were only distant memories. They were names in the history books, like George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt.
Isaiah looks longingly back on the good old days. Those were the days. God had done many wonderful things. Verse 3 states, “For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.” There was Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon. Good intervened at Mt. Moriah, Sinai, the Passover, the Red Sea, Jericho, and with Goliath. They were only faded memories. Isaiah wanted God to demonstrate His power. He wanted to see the heavens split open. He wanted an earthquake.
Why wasn’t God intervening like He used to? Why wasn’t there another Mt. Sinai or Red Sea crossing? Where have Moses and David gone? I can see the ancient Israel equivalent of the “All in the Family” theme song:
“Oh the way King David played, songs that made the Psalms parade. Guys like us we had it made, those were the days, and you knew who you were then, Israel was Israel and heathens were heathen, mister we could use a man like Old Solomon again, didn’t need no divided state, we were all headed the same way, gee our old Sinai was great, those were the days!”
Where had Israel’s and Judah’s good old days gone?
Isaiah understands why. In verse 5, Isaiah states that God helps “those who gladly do right, who remember [His] ways.” Judah “continued to sin against” God’s ways. They had missed God’s plan for their lives. God was angry with them. Isaiah wondered if perhaps they have gone too far, “How then can we be saved?”
Verse 6 is rather eye opening. Isaiah says, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” The people were stained by their sins. They had become polluted. They weren’t gladly doing right.
Even worse, they were doing right things. Isaiah states, “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” They were going through the motions, but there was no heart commitment to the Lord.
Sometimes we fall into that mode. We go through the motions of playing Church. Then we wonder why God isn’t blessing us, or things are rough. God wants our heart.
Isaiah really brings it home in verse 7. The real problem is, “No one calls on you name or strives to lay hold of you.” No one bothered to seek God’s will. No one was praying. No one was trying to reach God. Consequently, God had turned His face from the people. He allowed them to “waste away because of [their] sins.” Sin causes separation from God. Sin had driven a wedge between the people and God. This is why Isaiah wonders, in verse 5, “How then can we be saved?” Isaiah wondered if the people had gone too far.
But verses 8 and 9 are ones of hope. (Read them).
Isaiah asserts that God is the Father. It’s not easy for a father to turn his back on a child. I have watched fathers agonize over the mistakes of a child. It takes a long time for a father to turn his back on his child. One man I knew had a son who was constantly in trouble. He had been in jail, skipped school, and done other things. But dad was always there. I was talking to him one day and he threw up his hands and said, “I don’t know what to do with my son.” Imagine the pain that God must have felt to turn His head from His people.
But there is hope. Isaiah says, “We are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of you hand.” Isaiah says that they are willing to be molded into what the Lord wants them to be molded.
The people were broken. They were in a difficult position as far as international politics go. They were going through the motions. No one was calling to God. God had turned His face from them. They were wasting away in their sins. Isaiah pleads with God to take them and turn them into something new.
In verse 9, Isaiah prays for the forgiveness of the sins of the people. Isaiah acknowledges God’s right to be angry, in saying, “Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord.” In other words don’t be angrier than you have to be. God has a right to angry when we sin, the same way we, as parents, have the right to be angry with our children when the act in direct defiance of something we have instructed them. He then pleads with God to not remember the sins of the people. When we experience the forgiveness of God, our sins are deleted from His memory. They are not remembered against us.
Last Memorial Day weekend, I took my new toy to a family reunion. I had just bought a digital camera. I was a madman taking pictures. I took pictures of everything. I couldn’t wait to get home and load them on my computer. I was going to e-mail them to the family. I was going to load them into my family tree program. Something happened while I was trying to upload them to my computer. They were gone. That stupid computer had eaten my pictures. Or so I thought. The next day I realized that it wasn’t the computer that was stupid, I was stupid. I had inadvertently deleted the pictures. They were gone forever. That’s how God treats our sins that are forgiven. They are deleted from His memory, and there is no way to recover them.
We have hope as we enter this advent season. God has dramatically intervened at several points in history. There was Noah, Mt. Sinai, the Red Sea crossing, the battle of Jericho and others that Isaiah recalled. God intervened later as well. We can think of Daniel in the lion’s den, the Hebrew children in fiery furnace (Rack, Shack and Benny for those familiar with Veggie Tales), Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, Esther, and the biggest of them all. The biggest of course is the sending of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this season.
This is not the end of the story. Christmas is not the main focus of the Christian year. Commercialism has made Christmas the most important day of the year. The thing to remember is that the story doesn’t end with the manger of wood; the story ends with a cross of wood and an empty tomb. The forgiveness that God offers is was not accomplished in the manger. It was accomplished on the cross. Jesus became the perfect sacrifice for our sins. He conquered death and rose again to life.
What we celebrate this season is the invasion of God into human history. Isaiah pleaded for God to “rend the heavens and come down,” he wanted God to “cause the nations to quake.” God invaded human history on that night in Bethlehem, although it was not with a mighty earthquake, but with the gentle coo of little baby.
Our hope is found in the person of Jesus Christ. He is God, and in Him rests our hope. Isaiah was full of hope as he wrote verse 9, “Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look upon us, we pray for we are all your people.” Jesus gives us the hope that this prayer will be answered for us.
Have you ever been a position like Isaiah was? Have you ever been in position like the people for whom Isaiah was praying? Are you going through the motions?
God doesn’t so much care about our actions as He does about our hearts. If our hearts are not right with Him, it doesn’t matter that we do the right things or not. We can come to church and sing the songs and pray the prayers and read the scriptures, but if our heart is not right with God all that stuff is “like filthy rags” according to verse 6. Those things will “shrivel up like a leaf.” A fall leaf has a short life span. It is burned up, blown away or crushed into a million pieces.
Is your heart right with the Lord today? Are you longing for the good old days? Do you remember the times God invaded your life and rocked your world? Do you long for the days that God was super-real in your life?
The answer is provided in Isaiah’s assessment of the people of Israel. He says, “No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you.” The answer is to call on His name and try to lay hold of Him. Prayer is the answer to the return to the good old days.
Jesus said in Matthew 17:20, “He replied, ‘Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there” and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.’”
Jesus offers us the hope of moving mountains. Isaiah pleaded with God to make the mountains quake. Isaiah pleaded for an invasion of God. God did do that through His Son. Prayer is the answer for us to make the mountains quake. If you are feeling as though God has turned from you, call on Him and seek His will for you.
